Digital Healthcare – Realizing Interoperability with APIs

Editor's Notes

• #2: Hello, I’m Laura Heritage and thank you for joining my webinar on Digital Healthcare – Realizing Interoperability with APIs. I find the healthcare industry extremely fascinating and I am very excited to be focusing on the healthcare space. Healthcare is one industry where if you get a nullpointer you could drastically alter someone’s life. As you get see in this presentation getting the data to the right person at the right place at the right time, drastically affects an outcome for a patient.
• #3: Lets take a look at the complexities of receiving healthcare. There are several players that must work together to help you. We all need medical help at some point. If not you, think of your grandparents, your parents, or spouse. And when you receive healthcare you hope that everything is connected and streamlined. Most of the time when you are receiving care You are under a huge amount of stress and you don’t care if they are separate businesses or entities. Them working together determines your wellbeing and outcome. Plus, you are paying for it!! If you are lucky enough to live in a location where you have a choice on who your providers and people who services are going to be using. You are going to choose those who are connected. You go to your general PR actioner, You might need a specialist You could have some labs, Like my grandma you might have a device inserted into your brain to help controls Could need some medication from the pharmacy For example, I use target, and shopko as my pharmacy as they are connected and easy. I don’t have to carry a prescription. I have been doing this for years now.
• #4: Now the complexities of providing healthcare. The patients as we said before expected everything integrated and streamlined. They don’t care that the Ambulatory service is different from the Hospital services or that transcripts are in a different system. We are in a digital ages. Consumers of our services just expect more. They can do their banking on their phones! Healthcare should be integrated. The truth is though, Providers have a very difficult task. The must distribute and receive information from all players in the space
• #5: First there were paper files passed around. I remember when I had my first two children. My medical file was just that a big fat file that was passed around. Then just four to five years ago I remember my healthcare provider moving to digital records. A lot of the data is still transferred between entities by scanning files into PDFs and sending through email, printing out that information when you get it and sticking it into your own file system. * As you can imaging, this way of sharing files took a long time, lots of resources costing patients and providers time and money and sometimes mistakes happened. Besides the life changing event that the mistake cost patient. It also Costing both patients and providers even more time and money
• #6: Then came Meaningful use regulations. This was really introduced in 2010 which corresponds to my providers adoption of their electronic system. This is the regulation to digitize healthcare records in order to Improve quality, safety, Enable more engagement with the patients and family Maintain.. There are three stages to Meaningful use. Stage 1 started back in… Incentives were given to those providers who met the criteria. Now however instead of incentives there could be penalties if not meeting meaningful use.
• #7: Enter Electronic Medical Record software.. I remember when my provider first adopted the system. It took a couple of months until things became streamlined. Lots of complaints but now it is working smoothly. As you can imagine everyone had their own EMR systems.
• #8: Still exported out of EMR – Maybe printed out and file the old way Maybe attached to an EMR But still not very easy to get the data out of that PDF, in a timely manner and do any sort of decision processing on it.
• #9: How do you differentiate your healthcare services?
• #10: APIs provide the foundation for Digital Healthcare I am not talking about the traditional APIs for application to application communication of the past. I’m talking about APIs in terms of the API Economy of the Digital world. APIs that allow easy access to the data trap in systems. Restful apis… . Some EMRs are starting to provide API access.
• #11: SOAP - you can’t easily give a clinician a SOAP endpoint and say put this in a browser to see if this is the data you are looking for.
• #24: Immutable FHIR ojects